One Year In Review

I've had the opportunity to give a lightning talk about the work that has been done on KompoZer since the last FOSDEM — i.e. since the first alpha release of the 0.8 branch:

code cleaning: KompoZer 0.7 was built on Nvu, which required a 15'000 line C++ patch against the Gecko core. Most of this patch concerned UI improvements, which are now implemented in XUL/JavaScript. KompoZer 0.8 builds on an almost pure Gecko core — we just need a little patch for the PHP support.

new features: the DOM Explorer sidebar and the split view should help KompoZer users learning HTML and CSS, the new Site Manager (still in development) should solve most of the publication issues we inherited from Mozilla Composer.

team building: KompoZer isn't a one-man-project any more. Cédric Corazza and Frédéric Chateaux have joined the team to help me with the localization support and the quality assurance. Thanks to them I can focus on development.

KompoZer Labs

The best news in these last months is that the KompoZer community is growing. Last year, we've set up a KompoZer labs page with a few projects that we’d like to experiment, and five projects have already been selected by CoMETE students:

real-time collaborative HTML edition (XMPP/SXE)

CMS publication (XML-RPC)

enhanced DOM Explorer sidebar

easier CSS Editor

SFTP support

The CoMETE team is very motivated and these projects are making good progress — I'll detail them in another blogpost soon. In case you’re interested in working on another “Labs” project, or if you’d like to submit another idea for this “Labs” page, feel free to ping us on the #kompozer channel.

KompoZer.next

This FOSDEM has also been the opportunity to organize the development of the next KompoZer branch along with the SeaMonkey team. Last year, we’ve had a simple deal:

This deal is now becoming effective, and I already have a pre-alpha, Gecko 1.9.3 build of KompoZer. So instead of just porting KompoZer to Gecko 1.9.3, we’ll open a few tickets on Bugzilla to backport the main KompoZer features and bugfixes on comm-central: putting the code in a public place like BMO and getting reviews from other Mozilla developers should help keeping the project stable and open in the long-term. I’ll do my best to release an official alpha version before the Firefox Summit, with the features that I’ve announced in the EuMozCamp09: Bespin code editor, xml-rpc publication, collaborative edition…

Back To Real Life

I’m almost done with the urgent work, which means I can focus on KompoZer 0.8b2 again. I realize it’s been a while since the last release (0.8b1), so I’ll probably drop some of the unfinished work I’ve been doing on this branch to release the 0.8b2 version ASAP — hopefully next Sunday.

I won’t be able to work on these items before January 2010, so here’s a very quick how-to for add-on developers. I’ll suppose you’re already familiar with Firefox add-on development, or that you can read the related documentation on MDC.

The reason is, I’m working on KompoZer’s inline spellchecker at the moment — Thunderbird’s source code is a perfect example for that. Expect to get a fast and reliable spellchecker in the upcoming beta2!

Since SourceForge.net has changed its File Release System, it's much easier to publish a bunch of binaries for each KompoZer release. Unfortunately, it's become pretty buggy and we’re getting more and more reports from users who couldn’t download files from there. Even worse: most of the negative reviews on SF.net are about the erratic download service.

I can't blame SF.net: they offer a free service and KompoZer couldn't have existed without SF.net in the first place. But now that the project is taking a good shape, we’d like to get a better download service, and it looks like it won’t be possible with SourceForge, unfortunately. So we’re thinking of hosting the binaries on our own mirrors.

According to the SF.net download stats, the required bandwidth is currently about 60 GB a day — and we expect it to be much more when the final 0.8 version is released.

Our hosting’s bandwidth is only 500GB/month and we can't afford to buy more. We’d need roughly another 1.5TB/month for the 6,000 daily downloads, and probably twice as much when the final 0.8 is released. The idea would be to have several mirrors, each offering 0.5TB/month or more.

Give the 5 websites you find useful, or that you use the most. Try to explain why!

Tag 5 people, and let them know they’ve been tagged

The meme doesn't have to stay in English :-)

Five websites:

Windguru.cz is a pretty accurate wind forecast service that has changed the life of a lot of windsurfers. I check windguru every friday and I don't miss any good windsurfing / kiteboarding session: I’m always at the right place, right time — well, not always, but at least I don't drive 6 hours in my old, noisy van for nothing any more.

Vim.org, what else? After several years using this incredible editor, I still learn new stuff every week. I could spend hours tweaking my ~/.vimrc, just for fun. Call me a nerd.

dict.leo.org, by far the best German dictionary I know. Very useful when I post on kompozer-web.de. If I weren't so lazy I'd write a small Ubiquity script for this one.

identi.ca is my preferred micro-blogging service: it’s open-source, it’s all about geek stuff and FOSS news, there's a very neat XMPP gateway… and it can be used to post on Twitter. If you use Twitter and if you feel concerned by open-source, you definitely should have an identi.ca account.

Google News is the first page I open when I'm done checking my mails and RSS feeds with Thunderbird. I use it rather like a newspaper than for its search engine: Twitter is much more efficient to get the recent stuff.

For the 0.8 branch, Cédric Corazza (l10n lead) has decided to publish localized builds instead of just proposing cross-platform langpacks. Not as easy as it seemed… but the new “Download” page is ready.

I was having a look at the referrals for kompozer.net and I found this page on TheFreeCountry.com. Among the list of free wysiwyg HTML editors, there’s this paragraph:

Nvu - Complete Web Authoring System

(Update: Nvu has been discontinued. Beware of scam sites pretending to be the Nvu website and asking for donations/support. The official site is gone, and there are no replacement sites. In the meantime, use KompoZer, which is just Nvu with some bug fixes and a new name.)

Last week, Laurent Jouanneau and I taught Mozilla technologies at the University of Évry, Paris area. The Comete project was initiated by Pascal Chevrel (Mozilla-Europe) and three University teachers: Didier Courtaud (Desiderius on #xulfr and #education), Judith Benzakki and Denis Dupont.